Subalternity and Racial Patriarchy in Colonial Chinese-Indonesian Fiction: A Postcolonial Feminist Reading

Abstract

This study interrogates the representation of indigenous concubinage within the works of Chinese Indonesian male authors, focusing on the portrayal of indigenous women in their relationships with ethnic Chinese men. While previous scholarship has focused on the legal and social precarity of indigenous women under colonial rule, this research shifts the focus toward the intersection of racial patriarchy and hybrid power relations associated with the position of the Chinese Indonesian patriarch. The research utilizes feminist narratology to examine the structural silencing of the concubine and the narrative insulation of Chinese women from the foreign gaze. The study argues that these narrative choices systematically produce subalternity, rendering the indigenous woman a "speechless" subject whose internal consciousness is inaccessible to the reader. This erasure is further analyzed through the framework of racial patriarchy, which reveals how male authors mirrored colonial expansionist logic to assert ethnic supremacy over indigenous bodies. Furthermore, by employing the concept of postcolonial hybridity, this research demonstrates that these authors constructed a hybrid power dynamic: one where indigenous women were transformed into extensions of colonial-style domination to consolidate the status of the patriarch. Ultimately, the findings suggest that the indigenous woman is positioned as the ultimate subaltern, a subject whose mind and body are occupied to the point of social and ontological invisibility.